Forever Young
An ever changing place of thoughts and ideas; Ideas so important that they must be shared!
Reusing an Old Standard Pillow
All those old pillows just found a perfect place to reuse them and make creating your own pillow supper cheap!!
Begin by picking your style of pillow you would like to make…. here are 15 options http://www.tipjunkie.com/how-to-make-a-pillow/
1) Pull out the stuffing in the old pillow
2) Separate and stretch out the stuffing into small little pieces (this makes it reform better in the new pillow)
3) Stuff in all your little peices.
4) Close up your pillow and viola! your new pillow.
Feel free to post your photos or your wonderful creations!!
With the semester winding down and tones of work to do I’m actually excited about all my work that has to be done. It all points me toward my future, which is exciting. I’m really excited about moving forward to student teaching but finishing out my last few weeks of being on USM campus. I can’t believe this semester has flown by like it has. Its bittersweet!
Christmas time is always such a wonderful time of year and this idea by tsj photography makes the holidays that much sweeter. I’ve always grown up with a chocolate filled advent calendar to count down the days until December 25th, but this countdown is so much better - and one that I absolutely love. This year, I am vowing to complete 25 random acts of kindness throughout the truly magical month of December. Find inspiration from Tracie, just like I did, here.
xoxo,
My interactive bulletin board for my team teaching lesson tomorrow!
So excited!!
I had a great day with my little kiddos in the classroom today!!
They loved my math lesson with zoo animals! I was so excited to see them excited! Upon leaving one student called out to me saying “Thanks for bringing the animals!” Aren’t they just so cute!!
Today was a little crazy because it was bring your parents to school day in honor of thanksgiving so things were a little off and overly energetic but totally fun! hence all the explanation points! hehehe
I finally figured out some of my style of teaching and how I want to manage my classroom in the future. Order and organization are two key elements. No matter the age I want my students to know exactly what I expect from them and I want them to follow it and maybe even want to. Hopefully they will learn to love order and organization as I do because you can do so much more when things are as they should be. But in saying all this I know that I will always be tested and must develop the skill for flexibility as well as leading my classroom orderly.
Surprise Calendar
Photo Source: alphamom.com
Keep your kiddos interested and focused in the stretch leading up to the holidays with this fun advent/surprise calendar we found at Alpha Mom {via Ohdeedoh}. Instead of leftover Halloween candy, we thought it would be fun to fill the cups with fun activities, crafts, rewards, etc. for your students to look forward to discovering each day. For instance, you might include…
You might even add “Surprise Calendar” to your classroom jobs chart so that each student has a chance to tear through the tissue paper and discover the prize!
Inspiration for my first dance activity at Oak Grove Primary. Oh I can’t wait!
So I ran into some of the students I taught back in Aug. and they all refereed to me as “Your the one who taught us that dance” and then began to show me the dance we learned about the scientific method. If that wasn’t enough to make me smile I learned from their teacher that they are actually making connections with how helpful that dance has been for helping them study and remember the information. Here one’s example:
Student, “I like History class because its easy to memeorize facts for the test”
Teacher, “What was your last test on? ”
Student, “I don’t remember but I got a good grade on it.”
Teacher, “What is the scientific method?”
Student, “Recognize a problem, form a hypothesis, test the Hypothesis….. “
Teacher, “See how well you remember those steps?”
Student, “But that’s because we did that dance about them.”
The teacher goes on to explain to the students how this helps them remember and how they can do this for themselves when studying for school.
This whole story makes me smile because rarely as teachers do you get confirmation that the efforts your doing is truly helping the students on a large scale but it was glad to see in this case that the students’ teacher is helping them connect with the bigger picture and its exciting to see dance being a part of it!
Dance Inform, has news updates in the world of dance, audition lists, free stuff, resources of articles, etc. Looks pretty cool so far.
Here’s some more advice from three veteran dance teachers. Check it out.
Here is a fun educational, dance version of show and tell.
I think it would be cool if students were able to share some style, move/step, or anything dance related that they love or interested in. Maybe something I wouldn’t normally teach like hip hop but so its not just a time for students to show off they would first have to submit a description of what they want to show. This discribtion is a chance for them to practice their notation skills using dance termanology and a written discribtion that can be left with their classmates that would help them learn or remember what had been shown. This is important because when the student shows their desired dance item, their classmates will have a chance to try it out for themselves. This ways students are showing off what they know and like but that their classmates are also learning from one another. This allows me to get to know what their interests are and the students can get really creative with it. There is one question though should their be a criteria for what is allowed or isn’t allowed to be shown? And how would I communicate that to the students without suppressing their motivation to participate? things to think about… b/c you never know what students may want to share:…..
Instead of exploding everyone’s dashboards with several post I decided to share condensed version of what I have to share. I have lots to catch up on and lots of fun stuff to share!!
1. My first dance/bible infused lesson was a HUGE success!
I taught middle and high schoolers who have never danced before. They responded really well to the lesson which I think was because they were so tired from the rest of the weekend’s activities that they had no energy to try and not participate. Either way Ill take it! They did so well and they helped me to continue work on seeing my students as individuals. Since I knew these students really well it was easier to bounce back and forth from the whole class to individual class perspective. It was a success at infusing my two favorite things in the world!! This gives me great hopes for my dance outreach ministry!
2. My first visitor at my dance writer session!! yay!
Yay! I finally had someone schedule a tutoring session with me and it felt so good to help her. We basically talked about supporting opinions in writing and how to mesh two main topic into one paper seamlessly. I have high hopes for our efforts to strengthen her paper!
3. I have come to a point where I actually like my teaching philosophy.
Upon entering the program we were told that we were going to write a teaching philosophy and then rewrite it and then rewrite it. Not what I was looking forward to it but at this point I have written so many that this whole time I haven’t realized that I did not really like, wholeheartedly, what I was turning in. After having to write it specifically to a superintendent and get to use words like my students and I will teach, which changed the perspective on my philosophy. Now I can’t actually use this informal letter style philosophy in the educational profession but now that I have revised it to use more formal perspectives and include more of myself, I truly love my philosophy!! I can’t wait and am proud to share these words which passionately say what I believe.
